Open Source Software Isn’t Just Code. It’s Your Résumé

OpenStack isn’t just a way for tech giants like HP and IBM to mimic Amazon’s wildly successful cloud services. It’s also a teaching tool.

Created little more than three years ago by NASA and cloud computing outfit Rackspace, OpenStack is an open source project in the truest sense of the term. Hundreds of developers are now contributing to the project, and these developers span myriad different companies, including not only HP and IBM, but the networking giant Cisco, virtualization kingpin VMware, and myriad startups. And then there’s Dinkar Sitaram, a professor at the PES Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India who’s using OpenStack to immerse his students in the ways of open source software.

Sitaram has long encouraged his students to contribute to open source projects, and now he’s taking things a step further, teaming up with OpenStack India — a local developer group — to run seminars where students learn the open source way by jumping headfirst into OpenStack. The aim is to educate them, but also make them more attractive to employers. If you’re looking for a job in the tech world, many tech companies look at your open source work as much as your resume, and Sitaram wants to give his students the early edge.

“There’s a disconnect between theory and practice,” Sitaram says. “There’s not as strong a link between colleges and industry in India as there is in the U.S.”

Atul Jha and Dinkar Sitaram. Photo: Klint Finley

It may even be a problem in the U.S, says Thomas Hatch, the CTO of the Salt Lake City based tech startup Salt Stack. “Sometimes, universities teach things that are just plain wrong, from a modern software development perspective,” he says.

But both Hatch and Sitaram agree that contributing to open source is one of the best ways to land a job in software. “It makes it easier to hire technical talent,” Hatch says. “You can see how someone’s evolved — or not evolved — as a developer. We’re extremely wary of hiring people who haven’t contributed to open source.”

That’s why Sitaram teaches opens source. “Open source gives us exposure to cutting edge technology, and gives us the opportunity to contribute,” he says. His students work not just with OpenStack but a similar open source called CloudStack. Students have been working on code that lets you run applications across services from disparate cloud providers — learning learn the ins and outs of open source contributions. In order to help students from other colleges learn more about opens source, he teamed with OpenStack India to host a seminar that taught students the basics of open source, from setting up accounts on the code collaboration service GitHub to creating code to submitting the code to the official OpenStack project.

Sitaram says over 500 students signed up for the first seminar, but he space for only 200. Atul Jha, one of several OpenStack India coordinators who helped organize the seminar, says that other colleges have approached the group about similar seminars — and that companies like Dell and HP are already using this growing community as a recruiting ground. Which is exactly what he and Sitaram were aiming for.